Fake Charity Nerd Girl

I’m curious, what’s your alternative to copyright?

The simplest, obvious alternative is copyright, only less terrible. The current term of copyright is an order of magnitude too long. As much distaste as I have for government granted monopolies, I could be convinced that the least bad option is copyright with a term in the 2-20 year range (patent duration is 20 years, for comparison).

Another alternative is compulsory, flat-rate licencing. There’s a set fee for the use of the work, which anyone can pay to use the work and the copyright owner is required to accept (they can also accept a lower fee if they choose). Content creators still get compensation, via the fee, but the monopoly rents they receive are capped by the fee. It also prevents problems like the issue of orphaned works: if the owner is unclear, users can acquire a licence at the compulsory rate from the copyright office (and the owner can collect the royalties from the office if ownership becomes clear again). Note that systems like this aren’t new. A number of compulsory licences already exist in the United States, applicable to certain types of works and situations. Balancing exactly what the licence fees should be in a broadly expanded system of compulsory licenses would be a challenge. 

A somewhat more radical alternative is direct compensation. Essentially, content creators are paid directly, and the intellectual property is placed in the public domain. The advantage of this system is that bribing a would-be monopolist to release their monopoly using money from the people who would otherwise pay monopoly prices provides a Pareto improvement on a monopoly. Compared to a direct subsidy, using a government grant of monopoly like copyright to compensate creators creates a dead-weight loss, destroying value to the benefit of no one.

Of course, to do this, you need to determine a fair price. You might pay creators ahead of time to produce public domain content. That’s the classical state art subsidy. But it may also be possible to do it post-hoc. A variation on prediction markets provides one way to do this: have an auction (or a second price auction) for each new piece of content, or shares thereof, predicting what the intellectual property would be worth (optionally, let shares circulate for a while as well). In (say) 10% of cases, the high bidder (or bidders, if it’s being done by shares) pays the winning price(s) to the content owner, and acquires the IP; in the remaining 90%, the government pays the winning price and the content is released into the public domain. 

And the final question is whether we really need government intervention to produce artistic works at all. It’s clearly the case that many great works of art were produced before copyright existed.

Copyright (or other state-based alternatives like those above) are not the only way creators can be compensated. Voluntary donations are an obvious one. Patronage is another: either centralized private patronage or distributed patronage like Kickstarter (see assurance contracts and dominant assurance contracts for more formal game theoretic versions of distributed patronage.

And, of course, amateurs have always and will continue to produce works without monetary compensation.

Copyright, or any alternative system, acts as a subsidy for the production of art (plus producing dead-weight costs). The existence of subsidies, even given that the non-government alternatives exist, likely leads to more art. But there’s at least an argument that doing so is not necessarily beneficial.

These are all super interesting, thank you! I definitely think if nothing else copyright terms should be drastically shortened (and penalties for violation made less harsh, and protections of fair use made more robust) but compulsory licensing and direct compensation sound potentially even better.

Amazon’s Latest Volley

Oh, cry me a river, you government-backed monopolist.

OK, that’s probably harsher than I really feel, at least about individual authors. And they do deserve to get compensated somehow, so I don’t actually begrudge them their copyright rents (even if I think copyright is a shitty way to do it).

But don’t commit the very crime you’re accusing everyone else of. Especially since you JUST FINISHED arguing that books aren’t substitutes for each other. You’re a monopoly. Not even just a de facto market-power possessing behemoth (like Amazon), but a genuine holder of a government-granted and guaranteed exclusive (and transferable) right to the production of a certain class of good. You collect monopoly rents. Don’t pretend you’re dealing with raw supply and demand arriving at a “fair market price”.

I think less of you when you do.

I’m curious, what’s your alternative to copyright?

[…]

I really like these points on steelmanning. I guess generally I feel like there are two goals you might have in reading articles like this:

1) decide if there are good reasons to agree with the author’s point (i.e. self-driving cars are ethically problematic)

2) understand the author’s worldview (i.e. killing people in the trolley problem is bad)

These are both good goals and you have to read the article in different ways for each. Steelmanning is aimed at the first, not the second.

And the first is more practical to do in the short term. For instance, like 90% of what we read in my philosophy class is super deontological. If I had to read all of it as deontological, I guess there’s some small chance I’d come to understand their value system better and convert to deontology at some point. But in the meantime, I wouldn’t be able to believe anything they said, whereas by steelmanning them as consequentialist I can find some parts that make sense in my belief system.

worldoptimization has a good point. I think there are usually good reasons to agree with the author’s point, and good reasons not to; the question is of which outweigh the other.

I am not sure you have to read the article differently; however, since the second goal tends to support the first in many ways. Rather, it helps to understand the author’s worldview when reading ANYTHING because it will give us greater understanding and help keep our minds open, especially if the article discusses ideas that contradict our own.

See, a thing that’s interesting for this is that I’m pretty sure Jim’s objection to steelmanning is a result of his objection to Scott’s post about why people oppose homosexuality [content warning: neoreactionary], which is actually an objection to #1. Scott is saying, “Look, this particular dumb argument makes perfect sense if you just assume some people think such-and-such and other people are using arguments as soldiers” and Jim finds that totally offensive because he doesn’t think such-and-such at all. 

So I think we’re steelmanning Jim’s opposition to steelmanning.

Ooh, this post is yielding all sorts of interesting examples of things I wanted to talk about but didn’t have examples for.

I think this is a good example of the limitations of the principle “don’t do things to people without their consent”¹. Here Jim has said pretty clearly that he doesn’t want people to steelman his arguments. And here we are, taking one of his arguments and steelmanning it². We are using something he made in a way he explicitly didn’t consent to.

But I’m pretty sure we’re not doing anything wrong. We are having new and interesting thoughts and discussing them in a way we likely wouldn’t have otherwise; we’re learning³. And I suppose I can see why that would be upsetting; I certainly wouldn’t be too happy if Jim read one of my arguments and then blogged something about how it gave him this great new argument for why homosexuality is bad.

That wouldn’t be a violation of my consent though, even if I told people not to use my arguments in ways incompatible with my beliefs⁴. I guess mostly I’m just saying that you don’t get to claim ownership of your arguments after making them. Especially as it would be bad to say that Jim believed [your steelmanned argument] — once you’re asserting that he does still own the argument, it’s screwing with his consent to mess around with the argument in a way he doesn’t want.

I feel like this has some bearing on appropriation as well, but I can’t really figure it out. Something about rituals/ways of expressing oneself being part of culture but beliefs not being part of culture, so therefore you shouldn’t appropriate the former but you can the latter? I don’t like calling beliefs not a part of culture though, that seems wrong. Something about not appropriation only being problematic if you do it to a non-dominant culture? That would say we shouldn’t “appropriate” racists’ arguments that black people shouldn’t marry white people to show that arguments against gay marriage are bigoted, since the former belief is not dominant nowadays. That seems wrong too. I guess what I’m saying in this paragraph is that it seems like this example should illustrate some limits on the scope of “don’t appropriate,” but I don’t actually seem to be able to figure out anything new⁵.

Ooh yay this is interesting. I feel like exchange and cross-pollination of ideas is really important so I’m skeptical of any limits on it except limits necessary to incentivize content creation (you can’t copypaste my book and then sell it). I don’t think Jim is going to stop coming up with ideas just because we steelman them. This is also why I get annoyed at authors who don’t want fanfic of their work written, and why I can’t suggest any new limits on “don’t appropriate,” because I don’t really get what’s bad about appropriation in the first place.

Maybe I just haven’t had the arguments against cultural appropriation properly explained to me? And I also think I lack the “being offended” gene. Like if I were an author and someone wrote terrible fanfic of my characters I don’t think I would mind at all, and on St Patrick’s Day (I was raised Irish Catholic) I recognize that there are lots of appropriation and bad Irish stereotypes going on but I don’t feel bothered by it.